1. Top Famous Quotes
    2. /
  2. Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

Top Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

Browse top 61 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Jamaica Kincaid.

Favorite Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

1. "This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
2. "What I don't write is as important as what I write." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
3. "In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture—it won't accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy' time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
4. "The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
5. "Do you see the queer thing about people like me? Sometimes we hold your retribution." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
6. "Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
7. "That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept, for I didn't want to love one more thing that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
8. "One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
9. "I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
10. "I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
11. "I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
12. "When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
13. "I like to be in my pajamas all day. Sometimes I don't wash for days because I like to read and sit around. I like to eat in bed." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
14. "I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
15. "I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
16. "I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
17. "I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
18. "I went back to my cabin and lay down on my berth. Everything trembled as if it had a spring at its very center. I could hear the small waves lap-lapping around the ship. They made an unexpected sound, as if a vessel filled with liquid had been placed on its side and now was slowly emptying out." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
19. "It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
20. "But there was no use pretending: I was not the sort of person who counted blessings; I was the sort of person for whom there could never be enough blessings." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
21. "She had too much of everything, and so she longed to have less; less, she was sure, would bring her happiness. To me it was a laugh and a relief to observe the unhappiness that too much can bring; I had been so used to observing the reults of too little." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
22. "Of course his life could be found in the pages of a book; I had just begun to notice that the lives of men always are." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
23. "Bad sex. I wondered what exactly did she mean. From my mother I had gathered that the experience could leave you feeling indifferent, that during it you might make out the grocery list, pick a style of curtains, memorize a subtle but choice insult for people who imagined themselves above you. But I had never imagined the word 'bad' could be applied to it, and as soon as she said it I knew what she meant: it was like wanting a sugar apple and getting a spoiled one; and while you're eating the spoiled one, the memory of a good tasting one will not go away." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
24. "At the door I planted a kiss on Paul's mouth with an uncontrollable ardor that I actually did feel-a kiss of treachery, for I could still taste the other man in my mouth." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
25. "Looking at the horizon again, I saw a lone figure coming toward me, but I wasn't frightened because I was sure it was my mother. As I got closer to the figure, I could see that it wasn't my mother, but still I wasn't frightened because I could see that it was a woman." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
26. "Lucy, a girl's name for Lucifer. That my mother would have found me devil-like did not surprise me, for I often thought of her as god-like, and are not the children of gods devils? I did not grow to like the name Lucy-I would have much preferred to be called Lucifer outright-but whenever I saw my name I always reached out to give it a strong embrace." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
27. "She had shown me how to behave when applying for a job, how to show the proper amount of respect, submission, eagerness to please, even though in my heart I would not mean any of those things; she said that as soon as I had the job and was safely in it, I could let my real personality come out. I was not opposed to deception, but I woud have preferred not to start out that way." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
28. "Among the beliefs I held about the world was that being beautiful should not matter to a woman, because it was one of those things that would go away-- your beauty would go away,and there wouldn't be anything you could do to bring it back." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
29. "The photograph of my brother that is in this album shows a young man, beautiful and perfect in the way of young people, for young people are always perfect and beautiful until they are not, until the moment they just are not." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
30. "Oh what a morning it was, that first morning of Mrs. Sweet awaking before the baby Heracles with his angry cries, declaring his hunger, the discomfort of his wet diaper, the very aggravation of being new and in the world; the rays of sun were falling on the just and unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, causing the innocent dew to evaporate; the sun, the dew, the little waterfall right next to the village's firehouse, making a roar, though really it was an imitation of the roar of a real waterfall; the smell of some flower, faint, as it unfurled its petals for the first time: oh what a morning!" ~ Jamaica Kincaid
31. "By then I already knew that I wanted to have a powerful odor and would not care if it gave offense." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
32. "But no longer could I aks God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me. I could do what suited me know, as long as I could pay for it. 'As long as I could pay for it.' That phrase soon became the tail that wagged my dog. If I had died then, it should have been my epigraph." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
33. "People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
34. "The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
35. "In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my small drowning soul, for I would imagine myself entering and leaving them, and just that - entering and leaving over and over again - would see me through a bad feeling I did not have a name for. I only knew it felt a little like sadness but heavier than that." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
36. "At the top of the page I wrote my full name [...] At the sight of it, many thoughts rushed through me, but I could write down only this: "I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it." And then as I looked at this sentence a great deal of shame came over me and I wept and wept so much that the tears fell on the page and caused all the words to become one great big blur." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
37. "I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
38. "We had accepted each other's shortcomings and differences; then, just when we began to feel the yoke of each other's companionship, just when we began to feel the beginnings of what might eventually lead to lifelong loathing, we decided to move in together. It could have been worse. People marry at times like tat; they then have ten children, live under the same roof for years and years, eventually die and arrange to be buried side by side. We only signed our names to a two year lease." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
39. "...often a thing that is ugly is ugly in itself, and often a thing that is ugly is only a thing that is forgotten, kept from view and kept from memory, and often a thing that is ugly is not only a definition of beauty itself but also renders beauty as something beyond words or beyond any kind of description." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
40. "[Unhappiness] comes to you. You come into the world screaming. You cry when you're born because your lungs expand. You breathe. I think that's really kind of significant. You come into the world crying, and it's a sign that you're alive." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
41. "The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
42. "Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
43. "Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?" ~ Jamaica Kincaid
44. "I wish that I could love someone so much that I would die from it." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
45. "That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
46. "One day I was living silently in a personal hell, without anyone to tell what I felt, without even knowing that the feelings I had were possible to have; and then one day I was not living like that at all. I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be and things you used to do. Your past is the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
47. "That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
48. "...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
49. "I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
50. "I did not care about being a virgin and had long been looking forward to the day when I could rid myself of that status, but when I saw how much it mattered to him to be the first boy I had been with, I could not five him such a hold over me." ~ Jamaica Kincaid
First«12»Last

Jamaica Kincaid Quotes Pictures

Jamaica Kincaid Quotes
Jamaica Kincaid Quotes
Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

Today's Quote

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe."
Author: Angela Carter

What Did Jamaica Kincaid Talk About?

Thin
Hen
Use
Per
Hey
Wit
Ten
Ear
Lit
Bee
Thou
Son
Cause
Ally
Though
Ring
Self
Here
Times
Used
Read
Die
Less
Hear
King
Inn
Able
Ways
Sit
Sin
Away
She
Act
Word
Looking
Sing
Low
Sure
Side
Name
Place
Saw
Longer
Heart
Ape
Ears
End
Bad
Each
Tea

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Copyright © 2023 Top Famous Quotes. All Rights Reserved. | New Quotes | Topic List | Author List | Privacy Policy | About Us | Contact Us |